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Gender is inseparable from Shakespeare's treatment of love. Every relationship in the set plays is shaped by patriarchal structures that determine what women can say, do, own, and desire. This lesson examines how Shakespeare dramatises gender and power, exploring women's agency, patriarchal control, the role of marriage, and the ways in which the plays both reinforce and challenge the gender norms of their time. This is essential territory for AO3 (context) and AO5 (critical perspectives), and examiners consistently reward responses that engage with gender as a structural force rather than simply noting that female characters are "strong" or "weak."
Paper 1, Section A: Shakespeare (AQA 7712). Set text: Othello, with reference to Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale and The Taming of the Shrew.
AO Focus in this lesson Weight here AO1 Argument that treats gender as a structural force; vocabulary of patriarchy, coverture, performativity Developed AO2 How women's speech, silence and rhetoric are shaped by, and push against, patriarchal form Strong AO3 Strong. Coverture, the marriage homily, the double standard, companionate marriage Strong AO5 Strong. Feminist criticism (Dusinberre, McLuskie, Neely, Greer, Kahn); Butler's performativity Strong Section A assesses AO1, AO2, AO3 and AO5 (not AO4). This lesson is unusually rich in AO3 and AO5 because gender in Shakespeare cannot be analysed without the legal-religious context of patriarchy and the feminist criticism that interrogates it.
A note on method: the weakest gender essays simply rate characters ("Desdemona is weak," "Emilia is strong"). The strongest treat gender as a system that shapes what each character — male and female — can say and do, and then analyse how the language registers the pressure of that system.
Shakespeare's plays are set in patriarchal societies — that is, societies in which men hold authority in the family, the state, and the law, and women are legally and socially subordinate.
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Coverture | Under English law, a married woman had no independent legal identity — her property, rights, and person belonged to her husband |
| Paternal authority | Fathers controlled their daughters' marriages; a woman who married without her father's consent was legally and socially transgressive |
| Primogeniture | Inheritance passed to the eldest son; women were typically excluded from inheriting land and titles |
| The husband's authority | The husband was the legal head of the household; the wife owed him obedience, and he had the legal right to "correct" her |
| Chastity as currency | A woman's sexual purity was her most valuable social asset; its loss — real or perceived — could destroy her and her family |
AO3 — Context: The homily "Of the State of Matrimony" (1563), read regularly in churches, instructed wives to be "obedient and subject to their husbands, as to the Lord." Shakespeare's audiences heard this language as part of their weekly religious observance. When Kate's final speech in The Taming of the Shrew echoes this language, the original audience would have recognised the source immediately.
Despite these constraints, Shakespeare creates female characters who exercise agency in complex and often surprising ways.
Desdemona defies her father, chooses her own husband, and speaks publicly in her own defence before the Senate:
"That I did love the Moor to live with him,
My downright violence and storm of fortunes
May trumpet to the world." (1.3.249–51)
The word "violence" is striking — Desdemona describes her own choice as a violent act, acknowledging that it shatters social norms. Her agency, however, is progressively curtailed: by Act 5, she is literally silenced — smothered in her own bed.
AO5 — Critical Interpretations: Carol Thomas Neely argues that Desdemona is not passive but actively fights for her marriage, confronting Othello directly about his changed behaviour. Her submission in the final scene — "Commend me to my kind lord" (5.2.127) — can be read as either saintly forgiveness or the final capitulation of a woman who has internalised patriarchal values.
Katherine's "shrewishness" — her refusal to conform to feminine expectations of mildness and obedience — is the play's central concern. Her verbal aggression, physical violence (she strikes both Hortensio and Bianca), and refusal to accept suitors mark her as transgressive:
"I'faith, sir, you shall never need to fear.
Iwis it is not halfway to her heart;
But if it were, doubt not her care should be
To comb your noddle with a three-legged stool." (1.1.62–65)
Katherine's resistance is systematically broken down by Petruchio's "taming" strategy. Whether the play endorses, critiques, or simply dramatises this process is the fundamental critical question.
Her final speech — a 44-line declaration of wifely obedience — has generated more critical debate than almost any other passage in Shakespeare:
"Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land." (5.2.146–49)
The speech echoes the language of conduct books and religious homilies. Its meaning depends entirely on how it is delivered — and the text provides no definitive guidance.
Isabella is about to enter a convent when the play begins — she is choosing a life of religious devotion over marriage and sexuality. Her eloquent defence of her brother's life (2.2) and her passionate rejection of Angelo's proposition (2.4) make her one of Shakespeare's most rhetorically powerful women:
"Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder." (2.2.114–17)
Yet the play also constrains Isabella. The Duke manipulates her into the bed-trick, and his final proposal confronts her with a choice between religious devotion and marriage that the play does not resolve.
AO5 — Critical Interpretations: Kathleen McLuskie argues that Isabella is trapped by the play's structure — forced to choose between patriarchal marriage and patriarchal religion, with no option that represents genuine female autonomy. Juliet Dusinberre counters that Shakespeare creates space for Isabella's resistance precisely through her silence at the end.
Hermione's trial speech (3.2) is one of the most dignified and moving defences in Shakespeare:
"Since what I am to say must be but that
Which contradicts my accusation, and
The testimony on my part no other
But what comes from myself, it shall scarce boot me
To say 'Not guilty'." (3.2.21–25)
Hermione recognises the structural impossibility of her position: she is accused by the king; she has no evidence but her own word; and that word is precisely what has been discredited. Her speech is a devastating critique of patriarchal justice from within the system itself.
Her "resurrection" at the end of the play (5.3) — whether understood as miraculous or as the revelation that she has been alive and in hiding for sixteen years — raises profound questions about what it means for a woman to return to a husband who destroyed her life.
In all four plays, marriage is presented as an economic and social transaction as much as an emotional bond:
| Play | Transaction | Analysis |
|---|---|---|
| The Taming of the Shrew | Petruchio explicitly comes "to wive it wealthily"; Baptista negotiates dowries for both daughters | The play foregrounds the commercial nature of marriage with uncomfortable honesty |
| Othello | Desdemona brings social status and family connections; Othello brings military prestige | The marriage crosses racial and social boundaries, making its transactional dimensions visible |
| Measure for Measure | The Duke's proposal; Angelo forced to marry Mariana; Claudio and Juliet; Lucio forced to marry Kate Keepdown | Four marriages at the end — none of them straightforwardly romantic; all involve some degree of compulsion |
| The Winter's Tale | Florizel defies his father to marry Perdita; Perdita turns out to be a princess after all | The romance convention resolves the class barrier — but only by revealing that the barrier was illusory |
AO3 — Context: Marriage in early modern England was a property arrangement as much as a personal relationship. The Elizabethan and Jacobean period saw a gradual shift toward the idea of "companionate marriage" — marriage based on mutual affection — but economic considerations remained paramount, especially among the gentry and aristocracy.
While none of the four set plays features a cross-dressing heroine (unlike Twelfth Night or As You Like It), the concept of gender as performance is central to all of them:
Key Definition: Gender performativity — a concept developed by the philosopher Judith Butler — argues that gender is not a natural essence but a set of repeated performances that create the illusion of a stable identity. While Butler is a modern theorist, the concept is extremely useful for analysing Shakespeare's treatment of gender, because Shakespeare consistently presents femininity (and masculinity) as roles that characters adopt, resist, or are forced into.
Gender and power in Shakespeare are not solely about women's subordination. The plays also interrogate masculinity:
Exam Tip: The best responses analyse both femininity and masculinity as constructed and performed. Examiners reward candidates who can discuss how gender shapes the experience of love for men as well as women, and who recognise that patriarchy constrains both sexes — though not equally.
The most explicit feminist argument in Othello is voiced not by Desdemona but by Emilia, in the "willow scene" (4.3), as the two women prepare for bed. Emilia mounts a remarkable defence of women's parity with men:
"Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see, and smell,
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have." (Othello, 4.3.92–95)
The argument is grounded in the body and the senses — sight, smell, taste — to insist on a fundamental human equivalence: wives "have sense like them." The plain, sensory catalogue ("sweet and sour") refuses idealisation; it claims for women not moral superiority but ordinary appetite and ordinary feeling, the very things patriarchal idealisation denies them. Structurally, this speech is placed with devastating irony: it is the play's clearest articulation of women's equality, spoken by a woman who will, within an act, be killed by her own husband for telling the truth. Shakespeare gives the period's most progressive sentiment to a lower-status married woman — and then has the patriarchal order destroy her for her honesty. Whether this endorses Emilia's view or merely stages it (and then crushes it) is a question feminist critics answer differently.
AO5 — Critical Interpretations: Carol Thomas Neely treats Emilia as the play's voice of clear-sighted realism about marriage, and reads her death as Shakespeare's exposure of what patriarchy does to women who speak. A more cautious reading notes that the play allows Emilia her truth only at the threshold of her destruction — that her clarity is permitted precisely because it changes nothing. The speech is therefore a test case for the larger debate (Dusinberre vs McLuskie) about whether Shakespeare's drama subverts or finally contains its own radical insights.
A central insight of feminist anthropology — developed by critics drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss and Gayle Rubin — is that in patriarchal societies women function as objects of exchange between men: daughters are transferred from fathers to husbands, and marriage is, structurally, a transaction conducted by men over women. Shakespeare's plays dramatise this with unusual clarity, and recognising it transforms a reading of the love-plots.
In Othello, the very first act stages a dispute between men — Brabantio and Othello — over the possession of Desdemona. Brabantio's outrage is the outrage of a man whose property has been taken without his consent: Desdemona has been "stol'n" from him, the language of theft revealing that she is understood as a possession to be transferred only with paternal authorisation. Even her own defence of her choice acknowledges the framework she is breaking: she speaks of a "divided duty" (1.3.181) between father and husband, locating herself between two male claims. The tragedy then literalises the logic of possession: Othello comes to regard Desdemona as his — and a possession that may have been "used" by another man becomes intolerable not as a betrayal of love but as a violation of ownership.
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